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Election Looming, Tories Put Posh Foot in Mouth

LONDON — What could be more embarrassing for a party trying to change its elitist image than the existence of someone like Sir Nicholas Winterton? A Conservative member of Parliament for the last 39 years, Sir Nicholas wandered disastrously off message recently when he decided to share his thoughts on why legislators should be allowed to travel first class to avoid exposure to the common man.

“They are a totally different type of people,” Sir Nicholas declared in a radio interview, speaking about the relative ghastliness of people in standard-class train cars. “There’s lots of children, there’s noise, there’s activity. I like to have peace and quiet when I’m traveling.”

As Labour supporters gleefully disseminated
“LOL”
-annotated links, David Cameron, the Conservative leader, moved swiftly to register his lack of appreciation for Sir Nicholas’s philosophy. Still, with an election looming, it was a reminder yet again of how difficult it has been for the Tories to shake off a past that a fair number of them still seem to embrace.

Mr. Cameron, whose party is leading Labour in the most recent polls, has made it his mission to drag the Conservatives — kicking and screaming, if necessary — away from their old chilly image as a stuffy bastion of the elite, the mean-spirited, the entitled and the clueless.

Mr. Cameron has done a good makeover job in some ways, starting with himself. Answering to
“Dave”
and wearing jeans and open-necked shirts, Mr. Cameron comes across as modern, sympathetic and approachable.

Photo

David Cameron, the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, fielded a question during a meeting in a London neighborhood on Wednesday. Mr. Cameron's party is ahead of Labour in recent polls.Credit
Andrew Parsons/European Pressphoto Agency

He supports gay and minority rights, changes (or claims he does) the diapers of his young children and rides a bicycle around town (although his limousine was once spotted being driven behind his bicycle, carting his briefcase).

At the same time, Mr. Cameron cannot overcome the fact that his own background of easy privilege fits the classic Tory stereotype, Mr. Savage said. Among the most obvious issues, Mr. Savage pointed out, are that “he speaks with a posh accent and comes from the most elite school in the country.”

That would be Eton, the traditional finishing school for the aristocracy, and the alma mater of most members of Mr. Cameron’s inner circle. Mr. Cameron also went to Oxford, where he ran in rarefied company, enjoying shooting parties at the estates of his rich friends and joining the upper-crust Bullingdon Club, whose members like to put on white tie, get spectacularly drunk and destroy things like the insides of rural pubs.

Mr. Cameron also married well: Samantha, his wife, is the daughter of Sir Reginald Adrian Berkeley Sheffield, Eighth Baronet and a descendant — reportedly in three different ways — of King Charles II; her stepfather is the Fourth Viscount Astor.

With all this as material, Labour cannot resist. Prime Minister Gordon Brown played to easy laughs in Parliament last year when he derided a Tory proposal to reduce estate taxes as having been “dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton.”

The satirical magazine Private Eye’s regular cartoon about the Tories is titled “Dave Snooty and His Pals.” The anti-Cameron insult of choice for protesters at a recent Tory conference was “Eton boy.”

Mr. Cameron understands that this can be a problem.

“Look, if the next election is about, you know, ‘Let’s not have a posh prime minister,’ I mean, I’m not going to win it,” he said in a recent television interview.

In the eyes of many Britons, the Tories’ traditional social elitism is tied to another form of elitism — what they perceive as the callous policies of the haves toward the have-nots in the Thatcher era. That was when the Conservative government cut social spending and pursued an anti-Europe, anti-immigration, anti-union agenda.

Photo

Sir Nicholas Winterton at a beer festival in Macclesfield, England, in 2006. Public revelry is not what he is best known for.Credit
John Mountain/Manchester Evening News

Mr. Cameron’s efforts to move past that, too, have been thrown off track by the financial crisis. Reacting to Britain’s deficit last fall by preaching fiscal austerity, the Tories found themselves once more in the position of grim spoilsports eager to cut government programs.

Realizing how poorly that message was received, they have since softened their position about the speed and depth of the cuts; their indecision contributed to a recent fall in the polls.

Mr. Cameron faces opposition from within, too. Many members of the Conservative Party — “the nationalistic, right-wing Tories who like singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ ” as Anthony Seldon, a political commentator who is master of Wellington College, put it — admire its traditional image and its traditional policies, thank you very much.

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With the nationalistic United Kingdom Independence Party, not to mention the extremist British National Party nibbling from the right on issues like immigration, minority rights and Europe, Mr. Cameron is walking a fine line between embracing the new and alienating the old, including the old who are proud of their upper-class heritage.

Many old-time Tories are leaving Parliament this year, including the unrepentantly first-class-loving Sir Nicholas. But there are more waiting in the wings. Last year, worried about how an impeccably pedigreed Tory candidate named Annunziata Rees-Mogg would go over with hoi polloi, Mr. Cameron suggested that she might want to campaign under the name “Nancy Mogg.”

She refused, although, to be fair, another candidate, the spectacularly named Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, dutifully “de-toffed” himself by downgrading to “Richard Drax” on campaign posters.

Meanwhile, Ms. Rees-Mogg’s brother, Jacob, a banker who is also running for Parliament and who appears to believe he belongs to the
“Brideshead Revisited”
era, having once taken his childhood nanny with him on the campaign trail, went on television to denounce Mr. Cameron’s plan to get more women and minorities elected as the triumph of “potted plants” over “intellectually able people.”

That presented more easy ammunition for Labour.

How can Mr. Cameron counterattack? Perhaps, said Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, he could use the country’s class confusion to his own advantage.

“If the Tories were a bit more agile,” he said, “they could kind of turn it back on Labour and say, ‘Well, hang on — it’s an equal society where everyone is the same, which means that people of all backgrounds are equal. So why do you care?’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2010, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: As Party Fights Elite Image, Tory Puts Posh Foot in Mouth. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe